Bare Plurals in English, German and Romanian

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Bare Plurals in English, German and Romanian This thesis deals with the problem of bare plurals, plurals that systematically appear without determiner. The present work has three chapter and each one of the discusses the interpretation and distribution of bare plurals in three languages (English, German, Romanian). I. The first chapter presents the behaviour of bare plurals in English. A first observation is that English allows bare plurals in preverbal subject position, unlike some Romance languages which do not. * Two basic readings: existential (1) Students have passed the LEC exams. generic (2) Bananas are berries. We have to pay attention to the fact that the visually absent determiner, the null determiner, does not represent the counterpart of the indefinite article ‘a’; => they have two different readings. Carlson (1977) says that there are 4 ways through which one can demonstrate that bare plurals are not the counterpart of the indefinite article ‘a’. (i) Opacity Phenomenon (opacity inducing operators) bare plurals do not exibit and ambiguous reading (opaque reading) (ii) Narrow Scope Phenomenon bare plurals = unambiguous (iii) Differenciated Scope Phenomenon under certain circumstances bare plurals have a narrower scope than the indefinite singular (iv) Anaphoric Processes anaphoric elements trigger ambiguity for bare plurals. * Bare plurals can appear as coordinated elements (3) a. Cats and dogs were in the garden. b. Katzen und Hunde waren in den Garten. II. The second chapter of this thesis deals with bare plurals in German. German, as well as English, allows bare plural terms in preverbal subject position. * Object Position

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